Nominated to the court during the Obama administration, 59-year-old Justice Elena Kagan is one of the youngest SCOTUS justices. During oral arguments for the Aimee Stephens case, Kagan made her opinion known. "Ms. Stephens was being treated differently because of her sex. And this was Judge Flaum's point in — in that opinion, is that it's as simple as looking at the language of the statute, applying it to a particular individual, which Title VII insists that you do, and coming up with the obvious answer," Kagan said. "If she had not been assigned at birth the sex that she was assigned at birth, she would have been treated differently."
In the Bostock and Zarda case, Kagan in conversation with the lawyer representing the employer asked: "Did you discriminate against somebody, against her client, because of sex? Yes, you did. Because you fired the person because this was a man who loved other men."
Based on Kagan's comments and support of LGBTQ+ rights in the past, we can assume that she will most likely side with the plaintiffs in finding that they were discriminated against based on their sex — not just their status as a transgender woman in the case of Stephens, or sexuality in the case of Bostock and Zarda.
